The Obamacare "Glitch" Explained In 25 Quotes

While some have proclaimed the 36,000 enrollment in The Affordable Care Act "a good start," the online marketplaces that Obamacare has become more infamous for have been plagued with problems in the brief two weeks since launch. Politico provides 25 of the most telling and colorful comments made about the "glitches" the online exchanges have faced...

1. “I hope they are working day and night to get this done. When they get it fixed, I hope they fire some people that were in charge of making sure that this thing was supposed to work.” — former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on MSNBC’s “Now with Alex Wagner,” Oct. 14

2. “A thousand Social Security numbers being sent to the wrong people is not a glitch!” — CNBC contributor Carol Roth on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Oct. 12

3. “How can we tax people for not buying a product from a website that doesn’t work?” — House Speaker John Boehner, Oct. 10

4. “Despite the widespread belief that the administration was not ready for the health law’s Oct. 1 launch, top officials and lead IT contractors looked us in the eye and assured us all systems were a go. Instead, here we are 10 days later, and delays and technical failures have reached epidemic proportions.” — Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) in a statement, Oct. 10

5. “We’re going to do a challenge. I’m going to try and download every movie ever made and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare — and we’ll see which happens first.” — Jon Stewart to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on "The Daily Show," Oct. 7

6. “It’s a new rule: If something doesn’t work, you get rid of it! If the post office is late today, let’s get rid of the post office! If the plane is late an hour, get rid of airplanes! It’s ridiculous!” — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Oct. 12

7. “There’s so much wrong, you just don’t know what’s broken until you get a lot more of it fixed.” — Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Oct. 14

8. “They had three years to get this ready. If they weren’t fully ready, they should accept the advice Republicans are giving them: Delay it for a year, get it ready and make sure it works.” — CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Oct. 9

9. “I heard that [the website] had over 8 million hits — people that have tried to sign up — and so far they have people in the single digits that have signed up.” — Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), Oct. 9

10. “The shutdown has completely gotten in the way of the message of Obamacare not working. If there were no government shutdown, Republicans could train all their fire on the failures of the exchanges in a ‘See, I told you so’ approach.” — Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, Oct. 1

11. “The fact that there is any disruption in the website is inexcusable. But I think the attention is being diverted from the slowness of the website to the fact that we’re in this financial crisis.” — Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Oct. 10.

13. “Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.” — President Barack Obama, Oct. 1

14. “If Apple launched a major new product that functioned as badly as Obamacare’s online insurance marketplace, the tech world would be calling for Tim Cook’s head.” — Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas in The Washington Post Wonkblog, Oct. 4

15. “It’s bad enough that Sebelius and Co. produced a terrible taxpayer-funded product. It’s even worse that they didn’t heed the warnings or spot the red flags. They put on a smile, flipped the switch and sat by as it crashed…[T]he first person fired should be Secretary Sebelius.” — RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Oct. 15

16. “The secretary does have the full confidence of the president. She, like everyone else in this effort, is focused on our No. 1 priority, which is making the implementation of the Affordable Care Act work well. People are working 24/7 to address the problems and isolate them and fix them, when it comes to the website and enrollment issues.” — Press secretary Jay Carney, Oct. 15

17. “If the problems persist another three or four weeks, those at the back of the line will not have coverage.” — Dan Schuyler, consultant who helped design a health insurance exchange in Utah, Oct. 11

18. “If we are already running into issues at the user account stage, we’re going to run into a lot more issues when we get to the more complex operations at the [subsidy] eligibility determination.” — Dan Schuyler, consultant who helped design a health insurance exchange in Utah, Oct. 11

19. “The volume obviously is a factor: For the first day or two, it worked. A week and a half later, it’s no longer an adequate explanation.” — Washington and Lee University School of Law professor Tim Jost, Oct. 12

20. “In retrospect, they should have said to the public before Oct. 1, 'This is going to take a while; give us some time and wait.'” — John Rother, president of the National Coalition on Health Care, Oct. 12

21. “It is not unique that when you have a very large, new software program come out that people work to clean it up.” — Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Oct. 6

22. “[It’s] pretty clear that they’re working on the glitches in Obamacare, and it’s pretty clear that we need a geek squad for the website, not a firing squad for the entire bill.” — Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Oct. 10

23. “In eight weeks, we will find out what the cause was and work it out with the help of HHS and the Small Business Administration, to make it easier to enroll.” — Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-Texas), Oct. 10

24. “This week, Sebelius continued wasting taxpayer dollars on advertising and promotional tours. This included failed rallies at NFL stadiums and appearances on comedy shows to promote enrollment while at the same time, Americans were unable to sign up for health care plans as promised. Even Jon Stewart didn’t think it was a laughing matter.” — Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Oct. 11

25. “[It’s] like trying to repair a car while someone is driving it.” — George Edwards, computer scientist, to FoxNews.com, Oct. 10

We are sure this will all end well with the administration declaring some kind of "victory"... though that last quote seems to ring extremely true of every government plan we have seen in the last decade or 10...

They are missing the target …… Obamacare has NOTHING to do with healthcare and everything to do with government control. And yes, these “glitches” are what happens when governments harass, torture and execute innocent people. These are the glitches that old relic called The Constitution sought to prevent.

When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.

Turning the prosecution of the war in Viet Nam over to the "best and brightest" worked out really well, didn't it? Good old Robert McNamara and buddies relied on metrics (body counts, tons of bombs dropped, etc.) to measure progress. Along the way nearly 60,000 American lives were terminated and countless others ruined. Today's "best and brightest" are being called on to fix a system that has death purposely built into it. How many Americans will die, how many American lives will be ruined by IPABs/death panels? The similarity is terrifying.

I have been in "IT" since graduating back in the late 90s. In the early "aughts" (i.e. the few years after 2000), I was increasingly distraught about "off shoring". A lot of parenthesis, but the terms are loose and need to be defined to discuss what I am sharing. In short, offshoring failed because of "CULTURE", which you can't export.

What I learned, going through that process, getting older, and still hanging on is that all engineering firms (IT, civil, nuclear, petro, etc), all have a CULTURE. CULTURE is very important. Why? Because when your culture is to DENY problems, everything is fine, but it really isn't. This culture doesn't fix ANYTHING. This is very prevalent in IT. Why? I call it "polishing a turd". Lacquer up a log and eventually people think it is a polished product. I have seen this over and over in IT. That is to say that a complete FAILURE, had it been in any other discipline, bridges would fall down, power plants would explode, ships would sink, lights would go out, and so on. But in IT, executives with great selling personalities can overcome failures of actually delivering a product and go up the food chain (with compensation).

Further, a lower level manager can actually BENEFIT from inefficiency, commanding more budget, deceiving management, and ultimately going up the food chain as their budget grows dues to the incompetence.

I could go on, buy why bother. Any citizen looking for "IT" to solve our problems is sorely lacking in understanding about human nature. I get that "open source" is better, but 95% of the public can't spell "open source" and doesn't understand it. Technology, like a gun, is a tool; it is good when it is applied to benefit society and it is NOT good when it is applied to steal from society.

This is the future of government; the law says you must, the system won't let you, so we are taking your young daughter until you resolve it.

Hey FUCKHEAD was your company able to book the savings, boost EPS and allow your CEO and upper manangement to make CRAZY CASH while firing tens of thousands of Amerikan workers? If so, then it's not a bug, but a feature.

Memo to da colage bound, B sure to go to skoool and get in debt n stuff, like, cause there b jobs n shit for you when youse gradustate.

And if knot, youse can gets a job killling brown skins ober sees! hahhahahhaaah! Just dont get jurt as I hear the veteran services are, um, not really up to par.

Corporate culture exists in far more than simply engineering firms. This is not to denigrate your thought, simply to expand it.

The apparent culture existing in the circles of those who created the healthcare.gov website reminds me of the way ACORN worked. (I say apparent because I know no one involved, and rely solely on what I've read.) Remember those videos of ACORN people actively trying to help the undercover reporters circumvent the law? The coding techniques of the website's developers have been lambasted on technical blogs for many reasons, leading me to equate the coders to those filmed ACORN employees in their ethics and levels of competence. I've seen some of the code, and pathetic is not too strong a word to apply. Further, you mention open source, and rightly laud it. Are you aware that the website developers used some open source code called DataTables? While open source, the code is, in fact, copyrighted. For those of you who don't know, open source code can be used freely under certain conditions, one of which is that any copyright statements remain in the code base. Amazingly, the scum that wrote the healthcare code removed the copyright statements! http://somedude68-1.newsvine.com/_news/2013/10/18/21020833-obamacare-website-violates-licensing-agreement-for-copyrighted-software

If this isn't typical of the progressive mindset (you didn't write that code, someone else did!) where theft is acceptible if it's for a good cause, I don't know what is. I saw lots of code theft in 40 years in IT, and this is among the most egregious.

"Further, a lower level manager can actually BENEFIT from inefficiency, commanding more budget, deceiving management, and ultimately going up the food chain as their budget grows dues to the incompetence."

This is perhaps one of the more cogent descriptions about how government and other bloated bureacracies work. "Big" is dysfunctional by nature, offering cover to persons who are incompent and unaccountable by nature.

Aw shit, let's dispense with this crap. I LOVE chicken and watermelon. I am white. Color is not a predictor of an individuals love of chicken or watermelon. My wife is Asian. If the "black" gal I had the hots for years ago would have married me, my wife would be creole.

FACT: I will buy whole chickens on sale and freeze the flock. About every two weeks, I will get out my big ass soup pot and slowly boil that frozen chicken. Cold water, cold chicken, basic spices (salt, pepper, whole onion, carrots). I put it on a medium heat and as soon as steam skips past the lid I cut her down to simmer, simmer for an hour, and stop cooking.

Perfect chicken every time, just adjust the spices/veggies to your taste.

I get 5 quarts of broth, all in mason jars. Best thing that ever happened to rice since Tabasco. I bone out the chicken into Percect Portion bags via a pint jar. That is to say, I put shredded chicken into a pint jar, then when full I put the contents of the jar into a single perfect portion bag. I roll em like burritos and stack em into freezer bags and freeze the shred chicken. Because the meat never touches the actual freezer bags, I don't buy freezer bags anymore.

I can make bang up enchiladas (after half a case of beer) on a weekend and eat like a king (in Alaska - food sucks and is expensive). My wife makes Xôi (pronounced soy, like soy beans) from the shred, which is the best chicken/beans/rice breakfast I have ever had.

Don't hate the chicken lovers.

And I would eat it with watermelon if they didn't cost my left nut and leave me wanting for real melon.

There will be no cost to "any" low income people because as the SCOTUS said it is a tax and low income people do not pay federal income tax. This will destroy our country and the world will enter a new dark age without our leadership and values. Socialists have been trying to bring us down for about a hundred years and now they have us on the path to total failure and they will go down with our ship. Be careful what you wish for.

If you want to fuck something up, get the government to do it. If you want to royally fuck something up so badly that it is completely nonfunctional and costs a motherfucking fortune, get the Obama administration to do it.

“Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.” — President Barack Obama,

I tried to use the site...it was really 'effed up...basic things did not work...the project/quality plan must be a mess and the program management amateurs...I've worked on large SAP roll-outs in regulated environments which were probably as complicated as this so I know what it takes...no excuse for this.

Bet you are right about the dbs being jacked up but if these are bad then it is a given the web sites themselves are jacked too. If it is true they are running Win2003 server then its also likely their storage, networks, state mgmt, authentication and security are also jacked. Hell I'd bet any average non-H1B web jockey could find a half dozen single points of failure in their architecture before a database is even involved in a transaction.

I bet the only thing world class about this shit sandwich is the power point decks.

Are you going to get your federal subsidy every month, or only once a year when you file your return? If it's once a year will you be able to properly budget for the rest of the year?, or will you buy that new big screen? Seems a lot easier to pay the fine.

As long as I can work 80 hours per week to provide 'free' health care to illegals, and other worthless ticks like cops, soldiers, judges, postal workers etc, I'm good. I realize how fortunate I am to work shifts, breathe poison, and trade me limited TOE* for an rotting currency and the Atlas like supporting of an ever expanding class of ticks.

Nobody gets good sarcasm anymore...I blame it on the constant divide & conquer PC bullshit technique. They feel compelled to place a sarc tag on it, lest someone be offended.

Being offended that you and your children are being financially and culturally raped & destroyed seems to carry no import these days. But let someone remark on the color of your skin, instead of your mind...and oh, shit!!!...lol.

I went to a church in South Carolina and they announced that they got $24,000 in rebates from the government due to ACA because they were compliant with the law. The Lord works in mysterious ways, because the Church is exempt from paying taxes. This is probably happening to nonprofits all over the country.

Hey Pal look up some time the MASSIVE payouts to negroes who were supposedly be da scriminated against by the .gov sez they wanted to farm and shiz! As near as I can tell, to get up to 300K all you had to do is be able to spell 'farm' and be black.

I am very curious if the contractor, CGI went on the cheap and built a state exchange instead of buying it from first Oracle and second alternative Microsoft.Most of the technologies used are Oracle so that would make sense as well as “paying” for it to get it done right.Oracle announced their turn key solution, which was set up to integrate with insurers as Oracle has most of them as clients anyway, would solve the problem of the data getting to the insurance company systems..duh?

Again, did they go on the cheap?There are times when you need to pay for software and this was one of them if in factCGI decided to built a state exchange with open source software to save money…and who knows what subcontractor CGI may have used as well...

As I said in 2009, please don't nominate this woman for HHS as in a few years Health IT would eat her up and it has as she is no contest for the extreme math models and business intelligence analytics used by health insurers, they can't hire enough quants and data miners, look at classified...they duped and duped her again, sadly.

When in February she made a speech about "Speeding up Health IT" which everyone in tech just laughed at, it was clear indication right there she was in trouble..

We also had where she took on Dr. Hamburg at the FDA pulling rank over the day after pill with a very public dispute, sad. She seems to be very insecure. The one that really pissed all the hospitals and doctors off though is when she used Eric Holder to have him put his name on a big threat letter that went out to hospital and doctor associations accusing all of cheating and she brought nothing to the table...even Harvard was angry over that one so she does it to herself, time to resign with dignity while some is still left. She's just flat over her head and we have same issues with tech issues in Congress, at SEC and DOJ and I'm sure there's more.

Larry Ellison and Oracle could come in and save the day with a nice gesture of some free help and maybe some software to get this working and at the same time such a gesture would get the Oracle board and shareholders off his back about his pay...a win-win!!

The best and brightest are not working for the gubmint. This "system" is an order of magnitude more complicated than the IRS' ; it is doomed to fail. Programmers on the project are probably on a death march (but they are probably hourly consultants, natch.) Band aid and spaghetti code, anyone?

Listen, if you make things work right off the bat you might be out of a job.

On the other hand, if you can have "glitches" and "coordination difficulties" and "database synchronization issues" and "verification check loopholes" and "security concerns" you could have a decent job with juicy bennies for at least a decade.

Once the gubmint has all your info, they will determine your risk factors for NOT getting treatment, especially if you are 65 or older. Go short nursing homes; there won't be a need by 2025; just in time for SS and Medicare bankruptcy.

Most Americans cannot figure out how to complete a 1040EZ tax form. Income verification for Obamacare has to be at least as complex, then on top of that are 4 levels of multiple plans to select (and understand the consequences of each). I fully suspect we will hear giant sob stories on people who did not understand that they need to meet large deductibles before they get ANY benefits from Obamacare.

I wonder if he'll be taking questions, but if he does, they willl be only friendly ones.

In the meantime, from the article:

"Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared."

I've been reading along in the comments over the past several days of people's misadventures on the ACA website, and until now, I've had a vague feeling of noncomprehension why so many people have bothered to try; now, though, I realize the cause of my bewilderment: all this time, it had never actually occurred to me to visit the website because I have never had even the slightest intention of participating in that program, or anything else the USGov has on offer. I will not be paying any fines, either.

Be gentle guys this is my first post on ZH> I have been reading here for over a year and never felt capable of posting. I have laughed almost hilariously at some of the posts and have learned a tremendous amount. My comment is I truly don't think the american populace has a clue what's happening around them not do they care. That is what scares me. I never had time to spend on the computer years ago as a sngle parent but you can bet your ass I do now and I intend to learn as much as possible so bring it ON!

The GOP would like to thank our mole, Kathleen Sebelius, for the spectacular payload she dumped into the ObamasRomneyCare machinery. This is bullish for freedom lovers everywhere and gives us great hope that more bureaucrats will follow her example.

As I understand it, this isn't really the fault of the programmers so much as it is the administration's election year strategy. Election year 2012 saw Obama reelected, but with that reelection came the election year strategy that severely hampered the Obamacare rollout. Obama's election strategy was to provide as little ammunition to Mitt Romney as was possible, and that meant putting the Obamacare regulation rules on the back-burner. The website programmers didn't get the the details of the plan till Spring which is way too late for an October rollout. The even had to deal with other website changes the administration requested as late as September. But to make matters worse, they used a no-bid process in picking the venders used. Of course, that resulted in a who's who of campaign donors. But setting that all aside, how does that compare to state exchanges not using the Federal website? They had the same short period to rollout their own exchanges.

“The shutdown has completely gotten in the way of the message of Obamacare not working. If there were no government shutdown, Republicans could train all their fire on the failures of the exchanges in a ‘See, I told you so’ approach.” — Republican strategist Ron Bonjean

They won't. Because they are fucking RINOs who are all in on the scam. For the same reason milquetoast Willard didn't push the Bhengazi debacle during the debates. Because they are all a part of the second wing of the democrat party and they have captured the government. The GOP is just a patemkin village of a party designed to make you think you have a choice between the two.

Yea, I'm sure boat loads of people are just waiting for the database to work so they can fork over $2000 to $6000 annually in monthly premiums with the potential for $7500 to $17000 in catastrophic cap co-pays.

When reporters have to actually pay for their ACA policies (once their corporate masters dump employee coverage) they will finally get "investigative" and stop focusing on the theater of "good cop-bad cop" that the Ds and Rs provide.